The ever growing number of smart phones, personal digital assistants and digital cameras has made high resolution image and video capture commonplace. Yet these devices are only able to display their own images and video at a fraction of full resolution. Their display screens simply don't have enough pixels. Thus, the concept of a high resolution projector small enough to be incorporated in handheld devices is appealing and innovation in this area is proceeding at a furious pace.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/482,686 (filed on Jun. 11, 2009, incorporated herein by reference) describes a new high-resolution optical display system based on a MEMS phase modulator and an optical phase discriminator. Many variations of the system are presented including designs incorporating: one or two dimensional phase modulators; polarized or unpolarized light; reflective or transmissive modulators; phase difference or phase similarity discriminators; etc. A unifying theme, however, is that each phase edge—i.e. step increase or step decrease in phase—generated by a phase modulator leads to a pixel in a displayed image. An optical system, including a phase discriminator, performs the translation from phase edges to image pixels.
What is needed is a compact version of the display system that can be fit into personal electronic devices.